Red Faction: Guerrilla

Red Faction: Guerrilla's story probably won't win any awards for science fiction writing, and the logic behind the game's setting makes Star Trek look realistic. But the narrative provides just enough impetus to pull you along this tale of freedom and oppression, to a new world filled with piles of smoldering wreckage. Set 50 years after the first Red Faction, Guerilla finds the Earth Defense Force, the "good guys" from the first game, abusing their power and generally making life bad for the Martian colonists. You take the role of Alec Mason, an everyday miner who has an arm like Babe Ruth and a unquenchable desire to make Mars a safer place... for the colonists. The degree to which you can destroy the environment is Guerrilla's most prominent feature. Unlike the previous games, you don't spend any time digging into the ground, but you can dismantle pretty much anything man-made, piece by piece. Your prowess with hammers and explosive charges lets you make your own doorways through buildings, and, if a structure takes enough damage, send it toppling over. The wanton explosions you create channel other mayhem-friendly games like Mercenaries 2, but here, you get to see the effects of those explosions. Sure, you won't take down any skyscrapers, but it's more fun to take down a three-story building piece by piece than it is to just watch a larger monument disappear in a puff of smoke. That's what Guerrilla does best: It convinces you that its physics are real. If you take a wall out in just the right place, it can cause the entire structure above to slowly teeter before it eventually crumbles.

The third Red Faction game hits the PC, but does it hit its stride?

The urge to look for a door never quite leaves you. Which is hardly surprising, given that the regular gaming protagonist, carrying an arsenal that would embarrass an army, still can’t circumvent the flimsiest wooden obstruction. Yet in Red Faction: Guerrilla, Alex Mason makes his own entrances. With a hammer. There is nothing in this game, aside from its mountains, that cannot be smashed to bits. ...

This third-person action game is a great open-world adventure for anyone with an appetite for destruction.

Here's a question you probably already know the answer to: do you like to blow things up? Yes? Well, then Volition's Red Faction: Guerrilla is for you, since smashing apart buildings and detonating large quantities of explosives is basically what it's all about. If you're familiar at all with the previous games in the franchise, reaching back to the original released in 2001, you'll find quite a bit different with this third entry. Guerrilla isn't a first-person shooter; it's a third-person action game that plays out entirely on Mars' surface. While you can't tunnel through the ground in this one, you can break to bits pretty much anything built on top. Set in a Grand Theft Auto-style sandbox environment, the game offers a number of side and story missions in its single-player component along with a multitude of multiplayer options that, though there are issues, makes for some of the most explosive action around.